428
PARTISAN REVIEW
end,
to
breed, not, as is so often charged, materialists and sensualists,
but
voyeurs
and fetishists. In a series of bright and probing chapters,
Mr. Barzun makes his case specific. The result is devastating.
How, then, does Mr. Barzun put the two sides of his argument
together?
If
we cannot abandon mass society, and yet if we cannot
escape the ghastly consequences of mass culture, what hope is there?
Another Frenchman coming to America a century before Barzun had
a similar sense of the inevitability of democracy and a similar fear of
the tyranny of the majority. For TocqueviNe, the ultimate hope lay in
politics-"in order to combat the evils which equality may produce
there is only one effectual remedy-namely, political freedom." For
Barzun, however, the equalizing process itself contains the seeds of
regeneration.
The frustrations and vulgarities which so afflict us, he suggests, may
well be only the phenomena of digestion and transition. In the end,
Mr. Barzun is certain, industrial democracy will itself guarantee a new
liberation, generate a new creativity. "We often have a clumsy way of
going about such matters, but we correct our blunders as we go." In
many fields-music, painting, education, research, publishing, industrial
design-mass civilization, Mr. Barzun contends, is already leveling up–
ward. ''Gradually the grossness purges itself."
Mr. Barzun's moral is thus resolutely optimistic, even though
God's
Country and Mine
is more vivid and convincing in attack than in
affinnation.
As
a critic, Mr. Barzun is precise, concrete and lively; as
an appreciator, he sometimes errs in the direction of rapture. Someone
should issue an edict, for example, forbidding intellectuals to write about
baseball. His device of dramatizing cultural situations in terms of
people does not always come off, partly because the phonetic rendering
of dialect has inevitably a patronizing air, partly because some of the
incidents overtax belief a bit too much (has Mr. Barzun ever really run
into a Personnel Psychology Cogitationist?). And the book is too long.
Yet his capacity for appreciation is not a waste of time. He is an authen–
tic pragmatist and pluralist (or, as he would term himself, a Roman–
tic) ; which means that he can really understand the American temper;
his cheerful arguments for such un-American institutions as polygamy
and polytheism are refreshing in this conformist age; and discriminating
enthusiasm, which he has in abundance, remains one of the most attrac–
tive of qualities. Love, Whitehead somewhere says, is very penetrating;
but it penetrates, not to facts, but to possibilities. Thus Mr. Barzun's
declaration of love; and a good thing too. He concludes with Scott
Fitzgerald's lovely phrase-"Arnerica
is
a willingness of the heart."
